Tuesday, May 02, 2006

exits illusory

A tear hangs from the crescent of her eyelid. She senses its fall. And waits. It hits the pond, extending a vague and hesitant ripple. She turns to glance at this cause and effect—from tear to ripple. In doing so she catches sight of her reflection, surprised by her puffy eyes, unruly hair. ‘That is me?’ She smiles to transform her image into something familiar; to see the person whose mind is filled with awe, the “I” she knows. This makes her appear strained and insincere. Dejected, she sighs. There are no revisions, no rehearsals. The ripple knows the truth. The ripple knows the tear. She is the subject of a tear. Her self-knowledge affixed to this singular impression, this chance sadness. Time marches with this moment imprinted. There is no purging. There is no rear exit within the ego. Everything stays and there is only the momentary sense of forgetting. How can free will exist if memory filters nothing? Experience is left to sour until we call it something else, make room for it through elements of choice. How are we ever to live freely if the unconscious knows all our sins? Drifting forever between a sense of power and passivity like a chained dog, keeping up with its abusive owner, time. And if we are to purge, to atone, then how do we not throw the baby out with the bathwater? We can’t ever be sure of what we are ridding ourselves of. Those things we internalize seem to have their own symbiotic relationships merely subsisting in our ecosystem, that heart of darkness, that mind. If we throw out one memory, one belief, or one icon then how will that affect the food chain? What metaphorical contracts will be annulled? What subjects will we cease to equip ourselves with, like a painting rejected from a museum display? Each generation stealing and purging, hiding and limiting subject matter from the unborn babes and inventing artificial limbs, and new powers. It is hard to be born with your mind to the pulse when each generation re-sublimates the shame of its existence. But perhaps this flux is better to the passed down story, bloated with the glory of its own survival, as it greedily oozes through the lips of a bearded fellow to a bored audience, to innocent grandchildren. In chaotic times the melodious nostalgic myth is uplifting, but when faced with the daily stifling security of such a mother who among us, reader, is not tempted to quit her present condition. And love it seems, speaks to this abandonment. Love, must exist somewhere in this convulsion. The love of the movies is pure change of scene, disruption of routine, and instinctually, lust…or the more asexual feeling of having one’s soul penetrated and touched; in which atheists, prone to self-consciousness, invent a soul so as to be touched more deeply, so as to disassociate from the vulgar mechanics of passion.